What's The Best 10-Year-Old Sports Car You Can Buy?

A decade ago was a high water mark for sports cars. We found one (although it's modded) that represents the best of the depreciated.

This week’s AFTER/DRIVE topic started with us wondering what 10-year-old sports car we would buy. That timeframe, we think, represents a sweet spot. By then, the complex dance of computers, sensors and actuators had become quick enough for driving-dynamics technologies to start getting interesting, tire technology had progressed to enable performance envelopes we’d have considered outer-worldly just a few years before, but cars were still “analog” enough to still feel somewhat like cars, not big, black-and-white space planes piloted by people named Young and Crippen.

We started talking about the BMW Z3 M Coupe, the “clown shoe,” and moved on to its successor, the Z4 M Coupe. That, we figured, was a good place to start. It was niche enough to have been forgotten, or at least overlooked in a 2017 context, but good enough to be considered a modern-classic sports car.

Turns out, Classic Car Club Manhattan had recently procured a Z4M the previous owner had tuned tastefully, and so we took it home for a night, and then built an AFTER/DRIVE episode around it. When the weather gets better, we’ll get it out on the road for a proper video review. For now, it's the perfect discussion topic to get three guys who often sit around gabbing about cars to gab some more.